The XBMC Interface

The built-in weather forecast function can be accessed through the home screen. Your internet IP address will by default be used to auto-select your location.


XBMC playing an ultra-high bitrate (90 Mbps) M2TS file, a scene from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.


You can also install various add-ons.


Probably the most important settings of all, system-specific ones can be changed here.


The system's summary pages provide you with some useful information.


The hardware information page lists the CPU, a J1800 clocked at 2.41 GHz.

Transcoding Performance

Since XBMC at least requires 2 GB to run properly, we decided not to run our usual multimedia-performance tests with ultra-high bitrate video files. Instead, we tested the transcoding performance of the Bay Trail CPU by transcoding the aforementioned video files from 1080p to 480p. As you will see in the following screenshots, this clearly pushed the CPU to its limits,.


As you can see, the CPU had a hard time transcoding some very high-bitrate videos.

We also checked on CPU and RAM utilization with HDD portal and XBMC on and off.


With HD Station off, 483.9 MB of RAM were available.


430 MB of RAM were available while XMBC was sitting idle.


After a high bitrate video playback, available RAM dropped to 316.7 MB, which is quite a hit. The conclusion of all the above is that you had better buy an extra 1 GB DDR3 RAM, or, better yet, replace the SO-DIMM with a 4 GB stick, if you want XBMC to run smoothly. Since QNAP was kind enough to send us a 4 GB memory upgrade right before we published the review, we tried up to 90 Mbps video files, and while frame rates dropped to the point of randomly freezing up with 1 GB, every scene rolled by smoothly with 4 GB.